New Collections: Four Walls Records

This entry is part of an ongoing series highlighting new collections. The Archives of American Art collects primary source materials—original letters, writings, preliminary sketches, scrapbooks, photographs, financial records, and the like—that have significant research value for the study of art in the United States. The following essay was originally published in the Spring 2023 issue (vol. 62, no. 1) of the Archives of American Art Journal. More information about the journal can be found at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/aaa/current.

Four Walls was an artist-run exhibition and event space founded by Michele Araujo and Adam Simon in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1984. From 1991 to 2000, Four Walls was operated primarily by Simon and Michael Ballou in the Greenpoint/Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, where it was an important hub for the area’s burgeoning artist community. During these years, Four Walls hosted a wide range of activities, including exhibitions, conversations, screenings, and performances, all of which are represented in the collection.

“Artists need a little _______ in their lives.” So begins a notebook written by Simon in early 1984 as he began formulating what would soon become Four Walls. In a letter dated March 18, 1984, he explained, “It will be an exhibition space but not in the usual sense. . . . Instead, the shows will try to stress the information behind work so that the work can function as a vehicle for discussion.”

 Championing the idea of the exhibition as a catalyst for dialogue, at the outset Four Walls held monthly two-person events that combined exhibition and discussion into a single evening. Thanks to the participation of photographer Steven Kasher, even the earliest of these shows are remarkably well documented. The inaugural project—featuring paintings by Joyce Pensato and Christopher Wool—took place on Sunday, May 6, 1984, and black-and-white photographs record both the art installation and equally important conversation. From the second show onward, audio and, later, video recordings capture the discursive activities that were central to the Four Walls project. As evidenced in Kasher’s photographs, the audience expanded rapidly, with dozens of people packed into Araujo and Simon’s loft for the one-night events, which included then young up-and-comers like artists Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, and Julia Wachtel and more established figures like Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, and Pat Steir. The format evolved to include larger group presentations and performance. The collection documents the very first public appearance by the feminist group The V-Girls (at the time called the Venus Girls and comprised of Martha Baer, Erin Cramer, Andrea Fraser, Andrea Rosenthal, and Marianne Weems): a December 6, 1987, panel-performance entitled Sex and Your Holiday Season. 

By 1988, a combination of burnout and the pressure of juggling part-time jobs and their own art careers led Araujo and Simon to suspend operations. Two years later, after artist Amy Sillman introduced them to Michael Ballou, Four Walls was reborn in Ballou’s converted Brooklyn garage. Steered by Simon, Ballou, Sillman, and Claire Pentecost, Four Walls quickly became known for a playful, self-reflexive approach to artmaking and an idealistically anarchic, DIY structure that gleefully scrambled the customary roles of artist, curator, audience, funder, and collector. Events were usually packed to overflowing and featured such idiosyncratic fare as The Neurotic Art Show (1991), an open-call exhibition of “neurotic” artworks featuring a panel of psychoanalysts, and The Travel and Leisure Show (1992), which included travel-themed artworks, fictitious travelogues, and a “back room” show of “real drawings done by real artists on real vacations.” As early as 1988, Four Walls also mounted curatorial projects at galleries, institutions, and festivals in the US and Europe. Luckily for researchers, the organizers never lost their penchant for documentation, amassing an impressive archive that consists of approximately thirty linear feet of correspondence and ephemera alongside extensive photographic and audiovisual records.

 Jacob Proctor is the Gilbert and Ann Kinney New York Collector at the Archives of American Art.